Deploying Junk E-mail Safe Senders lists in Outlook

We are all the time confronted with spam and junk emails and most of us appreciate the fact that “those” emails go into a special folder – the Junk E-mail folder.

I will not go into explaining what Junk emails are all about, and I will not start to give details about the way Outlook decides what is Junk email and what is not – this is confidential information (for security reasons).

Instead let’s discuss another “peculiarity” of this junk mail filtering: why some internal, business and “legit” emails end up in the famous Junk email folder in Outlook when you use Outlook in cache mode (the junk email filter is activated only when Outlook is in cache mode, when Outlook is in online mode the filtering will be performed on the Exchange server).

Some of you might have internal applications, such as printers or in-house applications that send emails, and you may notice that some of these emails end up in the Junk folder in Outlook.

This might happen even if the sender’s email address is internal.

Usually this happens if the sender’s email address cannot be resolved against the GAL. You can check for example in the recipient’s mailbox how the sender’s address appears when double-clicking on it.

If you get this type of window, with basic information, then it means that Outlook cannot resolve the sender’s name to the Global Address List and hence treats the sender as an external user who is trying to do an anonymous authentication - so Outlook will consider the user a “threat” and deliver the email to the Junk folder.

If you see this type of window, then Outlook recognizes the sender as an internal user, and in this case, there is another reason why Outlook may rate the email as junk.

If you are confronted with the first situation, then one thing you can try is to make sure that your application authenticates into the domain before sending the email.

Then you can go to Tools | Options | Preferences | Junk E-mail and enable the two following options:

-Overwrite or Append Junk Mail Import List (check the box if you want to overwrite the Safe Senders lists the users might have already defined individually in Outlook, or leave the tick unchecked if you just want to add the entries defined in your list to the entries already defined by the users)

-Specify path to Safe Senders list – you can copy the SafeSendersList txt file either locally on the user’s machine (to a default location for all the users) or put it on a share where all users have access. Then you can specify the path to this location using this policy.

1.Specify path to Safe Senders lists (you can specify either a local path on the user’s computer, which will require that you copy the Safe Senders list to that location, or oyu can specify a network share where all users should have permissions)

2.Overwrite or Append Junk Mail Import Lists (if you Enable the policy, it will overwrite the existing list the users might have, if you put the policy on Disable, it will only append (add) the entries in your list to the existing Safe Senders list of the users)

3.You must also check that you have the following key present on the users ‘machines: JunkMailImportLists, with a value of 1 (to enable the import of the lists) (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Mail).

You can also modify the default Outlook .adm template to add this key. To do this, edit the .adm in Notepad and add the following entries:

·CLASS USER

CATEGORY "Junk E-mail For Outlook 2007"

KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

POLICY "JunkMailImportLists"

VALUENAME JunkMailImportLists

VALUEON NUMERIC 1VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0

END POLICYEND CATEGORY

NOTE: It is not supported to use customized .adm templates

Please find below some articles that explain the procedure to follow in order to deploy the Safe Senders list.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945059/en-us - When you change a junk e-mail setting in the Outlook 2007 user interface, the junk e-mail setting reverts to the configuration that is set in the registry after you restart Outlook